Passion (2 page)

'You've all had a woman before I suppose?'

Most of us blushed and some of us giggled.

'If you haven't then there's nothing sweeter and if you have, well, Bonaparte himself doesn't tire of the same taste dav after day.'

He held up the chicken for our inspection.

I had hoped to stay in with the pocket Bible given to me by my mother as I left. My mother loved God, she said that God and the Virgin were all she needed though she was thankful for her family. I've seen her kneeling before dawn, before the milking, before the thick porridge, and singing out loud to God, whom she has never seen. We're more or less religious in our village and we honour the priest who tramps seven miles to bring us the wafer, but it doesn't pierce our hearts.

St Paul said it is better to marry than to burn, but my mother taught me it is better to burn than to marry. She wanted to be a nun. She hoped I would be a priest and saved to give me an education while my friends plaited rope and trailed after the plough.

I can't be a priest because although my heart is as loud as hers I can pretend no answering riot. I have shouted to God and the Virgin, but they have not shouted back and Fm not interested in the still small voice. Surely a god can meet passion with passion?

She says he can.

Then he should.

My mother's family were not wealthy but they were respectable. She was brought up quiedy on music and suitable literature, and politics were never discussed at table, even when the rebels were breaking down the doors. Her family were monarchists. When she was twelve she told them that she wanted to be a nun, but they disliked excess and assured her that marriage would be more fulfilling. She grew in secret, away from their eyes. Outwardly she was obedient and loving, but inside she was feeding a hunger that would have disgusted them if disgust itself were not an excess. She read the lives of saints and knew most of the Bible off by heart. She believed that the Blessed Virgin herself would aid her when the time came.

The time came when she was fifteen, at a catde fair. Most of the town was out to see the lumbering bullocks and high-pitched sheep. Her mother and father were in holiday mood and in a rash moment her papa pointed to a stout, well-dressed man carrying a child on his shoulders. He said she couldn't do better for a husband. He would be dining with them later and very much hoped that Georgette (my mother) would sing after supper. When the crowd thickened my mother made her escape, taking nothing with her but the clothes she stood in and her Bible that she always carried. She hid in a haycart and set off that sunburnt evening out of the town and slowly through the quiet country until the cart reached the village of my birth. Quite without fear, because she believed in the power of the Virgin, my mother presented herself to Claude (my father) and asked to be taken to the nearest convent. He was a slow-witted but kindly man, ten years older than her, and he offered her a bed for the night, thinking to take her home the next day and maybe collect a reward.

She never went home and she never found the convent either. The days turned into weeks and she was afraid of her father, who she heard was scouring the area and leaving bribes at any religious houses he passed. Three months went by and she discovered that she had a way with plants and that she could quiet frightened animals. Claude hardly ever spoke to her and never bothered her, but sometimes she would catch him watching her, standing still with his hand shading his eyes.

One night, late, as she slept, she heard a tapping at the door and turning up her lamp saw Claude in the doorway. He had shaved, he was wearing his nightshirt and he smelled of carbolic soap.

Will you marry me, Georgette?
^,

She shook her head and he went away, returning now and again as time continued, always standing by the door, clean shaven and smelling of soap.

She said yes. She couldn't go home. She couldn't go to a convent so long as her father was bribing every Mother Superior with a mind to a new altar piece, but she couldn't go on living with this quiet man and his talkative neighbours unless he married her. He got into bed beside her and stroked her face and taking her hand put it to his face. She was not afraid. She believed in the power of the Virgin.

After that, whenever he wanted her, he tapped at the door in just the same way and waited until she said yes.

Then I was born.

She told me about my grandparents and their house and their piano, and a shadow crossed her eyes when she thought I would never see them, but I liked my anonymity. Everyone else in the village had strings of relations to pick fights with and know about. I made up stories about mine. They were whatever I wanted them to be depending on my mood.

Thanks to my mother's efforts and the rusty scholarliness of our priest I learned to read in my own language, Latin and English and I learned arithmetic, the rudiments of first aid and because the priest also supplemented his meagre income by betting and gambling I learned every card game and a few tricks. I never told my mother that the priest had a hollow Bible with a pack of cards inside. Sometimes he took it to our service by mistake and then the reading was always from the first chapter of Genesis. The villagers thought he loved the creation story. He was a good man but lukewarm. I would have preferred a burning Jesuit, perhaps then I might have found the extasy I need to believe.

I asked him why he was a priest, and he said if you have to work for anybody an absentee boss is best.

We fished together and he pointed out the girls he wanted and asked me to do it for him. I never did. I came to women late like my father.

When I left, Mother didn't cry. It was Claude who cried. She gave me her little Bible, the one that she had kept for so many years, and I promised her I would read it

The cook saw my hesitation and poked me with a skewer. 'New to it, lad? Don't be afraid. These girls I know are clean as a whisde and wide as the fields of France.' I got ready, washing myself all over with carbolic soap.

Bonaparte, the Corsican. Born in 1769, a Leo.

Short, pale, moody, with an eye to the future and a singular ability to concentrate. In 1789 revolution opened a closed world and for a time the meanest street boy had more on his side than any aristocrat For a young Lieutenant skilled in artillery, the chances were kind and in a few years General Bonaparte was turning Italy into the fields of France.

'What is luck', he said, 'but the ability to exploit accidents?' He believed he was the centre of the world and for a long time there was nothing to change him from this belief. Not even John Bull. He was in love with himself and France joined in. It was a romance. Perhaps all romance is like that; not a contract between equal parties but an explosion of dreams and desires that can find no outlet in everyday life. Only a drama will do and while the fireworks last the sky is a different colour. He became an Emperor. He called the Pope from the Holy City to crown him but at the last second he took the crown in his own hands and placed it on his own head. He divorced the only person who understood him, the only person he ever really loved, because she couldn't give him a child. That was the only part of the romance he couldn't manage by himself.

He is repulsive and fascinating by turns.

What would you do if you were an Emperor? Would soldiers become numbers? Would batdes become diagrams? Would intellectuals become a threat? Would you end your days on an island where the food is salty and the company bland?

He was the most powerful man in the world and he couldn't beat Josephine at billiards.

I'm telling you stories. Trust me.

The brothel was run by a giantess from Sweden. Her hair was yellow like dandelions and like a living rug it covered her knees. Her arms were bare, the dress she wore had the sleeves pushed up and fastened with a pair of garters. Around her neck on a leather thong she kept a flat-faced wooden doll. She saw me staring at it and drawing my head close forced me to sniff it. It smelled of musk and strange flowers.

'From Martinique, like Bonaparte's Josephine.'

I smiled and said, 'Vive notre dame de victoires,' but the giantess laughed and said that Josephine would never be crowned

in Westminster as Bonaparte had promised. The cook told her sharply to mind her words, but she had no fear of him and led us to a cold stone room furnished with pallet beds and a long table stacked with jars of red wine. I had expected red velvet the way the priest had described these seats of temporary pleasure, but there was no softness here, nothing to disguise our business. When the women came in they were older than I had imagined, not at all like the pictures in the priest's book of sinful things. Not snake-like, Eve-like with breasts like apples, but round and resigned, hair thrown into hasty bundles or draped around their shoulders. My companions brayed and whisded and shoved the wine down their throats straight from the jars. I wanted a cup of water but didn't know how to ask.

The cook moved first, slapping a woman on the rump and making some joke about her corset. He still wore his fat-stained boots. The others started to pair off leaving me with a patient black-toothed woman who had ten rings on one finger.

'I've just joined up,' I told her, hoping she'd realise that I

didn't know what to do.

She pinched my cheek. 'That's what they all say, they think it must be cheaper first time. Hard work I call it, like teaching billiards without a cue.' She looked over at the cook, who was squatting on one of the pallets trying to get his cock out. His woman knelt in front of him, her arms folded. Suddenly he slapped her across the face and the snap killed the talk for a moment.

'Help me, you bitch, put your hand in, can't you, or are you afraid of eels?'

I saw her lip curl and the red mark on her cheek glowed despite her rough skin. She didn't answer, just poked her hand into his trousers and brought it out like a ferret by the neck.

'In your mouth.'

I was thinking about porridge.

'Fine man your friend,' said my woman.

I wanted to go to him and ram his face in the blanket until he had no breath left. Then he came with a great bellow and flopped backwards on his elbows. His woman got up and very deliberately spat in the bowl on the floor, then rinsed her mouth with wine and spat that out too. She was noisy and the cook heard and asked her what she was doing throwing his sperm to the sewers of France.

'What else would I do with it?'

He came towards her with his fist raised but it never fell. My woman stepped forward and coshed him on the back of the head with a wine jar. She held her companion for a moment and kissed her swiftly on the forehead.

She would never do that to me.

I told her I had a headache and went to sit outside.

We carried our leader home taking turns in fours to bear him like a coffin on our shoulders, face down in case he vomited. In the morning he swaggered over to the officers and boasted how he'd made the bitch swallow him whole and how her cheeks had filled out like a rat's when she took him.

'What happened to your head?'

'Fell over on the way back,' he said, looking at me.

He went out whoring most nights but I never went with him again. Apart from Domino and Patrick, the de-frocked priest with the eagle eye, I hardly spoke to anyone. I spent my time learning how to stuff a chicken and slow down the cooking process. I was waiting for Bonaparte.

At last, on a hot morning when the sea left salt craters in between the dock stones, he came. He came with his Generals Murat and Bernadotte. He came with his new Admiral of the Fleet. He came with his wife, whose grace made the roughest in the camp polish his boots twice. But I saw no one but him. For years, my mentor, the priest who had supported the Revolution, told me that Bonaparte was perhaps the Son of God come again. I learned his batdes and campaigns instead of histoiy and geography. I have lain with the priest on an old and impossibly folded map of the world looking at the places he had gone and watching the frontiers of France push slowly out. The priest carried a drawing of Bonaparte next to his drawing of the Blessed Virgin and I grew up with both, unknown to my mother, who remained a monarchist and who still prayed for the soul of Marie Antoinette.

I was only five when the Revolution turned Paris into a free man's city and France into the scourge of Europe. Our village was not very far down the Seine, but we might have been living on the moon. No one really knew what was happening except that King and Queen were imprisoned. We relied on gossip, but the priest crept back and forth relying on his cloth to save him from the cannon or the knife. The village was divided. Most felt King and Queen are right though King and Queen had no care for us, except as revenue and scenery. But these are my words, taught to me by a clever man who was no respecter of persons. For die most part, my friends in the village could not speak of their unease, but I saw it in their shoulders as they rounded up the catde, saw it in their faces as they listened to the priest in church. We were always helpless, whoever was in power.

The priest said we were living in the last days, that the Revolution would bring forth a new Messiah and the millennium on earth. He never went as far as that in church. He told me. Not the others. Not Claude with his pails, not Jacques in the dark with his sweetheart, not my mother with her prayers. He took me on his knees, holding me against the black cloth that smelled of age and hay, and told me not to be afraid of rumours in our village that everyone in Paris was either starving or dead. 'Christ said he came not to bring peace but a sword, Henri, remember that'

As I grew older and the turbulent times setded into something like calm, Bonaparte began to make a name for himself. We called him our Emperor long before he had taken that tide to himself. And on our way home from the makeshift church in the dusk in winter, the priest looked towards the track that led away and held my arm too tight. 'He'll call you,' he whispered, 'like God called Samuel and you'll go.'